Casio WQV-1 (2000)

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Announced by Casio on 2000-01-06. At the CES 2000, Casio presented a variety of novelty wrist watches. Beside an MP3 wirst watch, Casio also showcased the world's first wrist watch digital camera, the Casio WQV-1. The WQV-1 was a very slick and lightweight wrist watch and could capture up to 100 images in it's internal 1MB memory. Apart from that the watch of course could display date and time, had a stop watch and timer function as well as transmission capability by infrared port. Another feature was the so-called 'visual database' which meant that one could take a snapshot of a person, type in a name to that picture and thus use it as a visual phone book.

But that's not all! The camera also had a novelty which other digital cameras lacked, a so-called merger snap shot mode. It was possible to split the screen during recording, so one could take two separate images and merge them on-the-fly. Recording and deleting images was painstakingly slow and took up to 10 seconds or more. For battery saving purposes the watch would go into stand-by mode. Three separate shooting settings were available, Indoor 50 and 60Hz and Outdoor.

 

Initially Casio marketed two different models with different cases and wrist bands. One in a dark gray resin for casual wear and one in silver metal for the business world. A separat PC connection kit was also available to connect the watch to a compatible PC and copy / store images on a harddrive. By using the infrared port it was also possible to swap images between two watches. The wrist watch had a built-in tilt sensor for ..... what exactly? Anyone knows this?

The screen of the watch is a LCD monitor with 16 gray levels and a resolution of 120 x 120 dots. The overall resolution was a measily 28,000 pixels. The recorded image was stored inside the watch in a proprietary file format but was converted to BMP/JPEG once the image was transferred to a PC. Shooting distance was from 30cm to 'infinity'. The watch had a battery life expectancy of 6 months if one used the watch for only '60 seconds per day'.

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